


This Little Between Us

by rosereddawn



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-06
Updated: 2011-05-06
Packaged: 2017-10-19 01:38:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/195452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosereddawn/pseuds/rosereddawn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thanks to reapertownusa for beta reading.<br/>For the bites/bruises square on my kink bingo card.</p>
    </blockquote>





	This Little Between Us

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to reapertownusa for beta reading.  
> For the bites/bruises square on my kink bingo card.

It is a love that shows not in feather light caresses and sticky sweet kisses. No whispered I love you's and honeymoon suites.

It is a love that hurts.

It is a love that builds on the momentum of their lives, straining in the slow hours, tearing and subsiding in the confinement of motel rooms and libraries and diners, in the directionless search all over the country for something that will set it into motion, the right newspaper clipping, a wrong kind of death, and then it will pace with the approach of the hunt. In the haste of the night, between the firing of shotguns and swinging of knives, it is forgotten, but it is the undeniable layer, their bullet proof vest that comes clear once smoke rises from the dug out grave and calms the racing hearts.

In the laziness of the day after the hunt, when all roads beckon with easiness and their jeans still carry the scent of graveyard fires, it rises the closest to the surface and the little space between them collapses further with need.

They have been brought up with an awareness of distance as weakness, as a place where shadows creep in. They know to always have each other's back and it is the sound of their breathing that carries them to sleep every night. But right then, keeping each other in eye sight is not enough; anything short of filling all five senses with brother and here and alive is not enough.

At a gas station, when Dean is filling up the tank, Sam slides in beside him and in this shielded place, behind the metal shell of the car, he closes the last of this distance. He brushes aside the tip of the jacket and slips his fingers under the soft cotton of a worn out shirt, and both of them still when Sam's fingertips meet the naked, quivering skin of Dean's belly.

“Is it there?” Sam asks and Dean nods. His eyes flutter shut and the nozzle clicks as he lets go.

Sam peels up the layers, driven by an awed need to see, and he reveals a piece of bruised flesh that stretches from the seam of the jeans to the costal arch, a painting drawn from inside the body onto the paper thin barrier of skin, angry red and purple, and yellow-ish on the edges where it fades.

It is for him, evidence and everlasting promise of sacrifice and care, and Sam needs to touch, needs to feel its heat under his palm, needs to hold and shield and claim where Dean is hurting. Dean exhales under his hand, sways into every hardening of Sam's grip and drinks in the bright stings of pain that spell out Sam's acknowledgment.

It is a love that thrums beneath the hearing threshold and will not be pronounced but in secrecy, in the wake of sorrow and death.

Their love springs from horror and blossoms in blood.


End file.
